Day for Night by Frederick Reiken: review

Day for Night by Frederick Reiken is a labyrinthine tale of secrets and the
Holocaust
that impresses Catherine Taylor

By Catherine Taylor

5:40AM BST 11 Jul 2010

A novel with a sprawling scope, using the first-person narrative of 10 seemingly disconnected characters on the lasting impact of the Holocaust, really ought not to work, or even be coherent. But this one does, and the result is a dazzling tour de force, every bit as labyrinthine as the Borges epigraph that prefaces it.

The book opens unremarkably – it’s 1984, and a middle-aged American couple, Beverly and David, are snorkelling in Florida with David’s teenage son. Beverly strikes up a conversation with Tim, their guide; that night, she will sneak out and accompany him on a walk under a full, bright moon. Ostensibly it seems as if there is an illicit aspect to the meeting; in reality Beverly is facing the harsh fact that David, her soulmate, is dying of cancer.

The scene then allows a vital glimpse into the very heart of the story as Beverly, at this crisis point, recalls moonlit walks with her long-lost father. For Beverly was once Bejla, who as a child had been forced to flee from Poland, first to Lithuania and then, with her mother, to the United States. Her father, Jonah, and uncle, Pinchas, were two of the so-called Five Hundred Jewish Men, intellectuals rounded up and murdered in 1941 in Kovno. Doris, her mother’s sister, survived Auschwitz, later recalling in a powerful testimony why she believes she was not allowed to die there.

The third and most significant in terms of the Borgesian twists and turns is Beverly’s remembrance of a Yiddish phrase of her father’s – 'A nechtiger tog’ or 'yesterday’s night’ – meaning something absurd or improbable. For what if Jonah or Pinchas or both had actually escaped their supposed fate? 'The web of time… embraces every possibility,’ Borges reminds us. To mesh the web together, a young man in a coma, the uncovering of a secret abusive cult, a veterinarian émigré to Israel, a high school student’s spooky experiments with metafiction and an FBI agent on the trail of an alleged terrorist all play their part.

This last and most mysterious figure, a female fugitive from justice, consistently appears as a portent throughout the novel. Frederick Reiken’s backdrops are as compelling as his plotting – the aquatic life of the Cayman Islands, the deserts of Israel, the forests of Lithuania. There are too few actual miracles to emerge from the horror of the Shoah; this humane, enriching work makes us believe in one.